“Endangering Life: The Raced Politics of Gender in an Australian Case of the Criminalization of Exposure to HIV”

introduced by Professor David Murray

Wednesday, October 8, 3-5pm, 280N York Lanes

Please RSVP to this event by emailing juliapyr@yorku.ca.

Refreshments provided.

This paper tells a story of the criminalisation of exposure to HIV in recent times in Australia. It concerns John Chan, an Australian citizen of Sudanese background living in Adelaide, South Australia. Mr Chan came to Australia as a refugee in 1999. In 2004 he was diagnosed with HIV and, after first coming to the attention of the South Australian Health Department authorities, in 2009 he was arrested on a charge of ‘Endangering Life’ for having unprotected (consensual) sex with three women and thus exposing them to the virus. In mid 2011 he was sentenced to five and a half years in gaol. The paper uses John Chan’s story as a case study through which to analyse some aspects of contemporary gender relations in Australia. Its focus is on the position of white women in a cultural and political environment characterised by both conservative and neo-liberal discourses of gender and sexuality.

Barbara Baird is an Associate Professor in Women’s Studies at Flinders University in South Australia. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Feminist Research at York. Her research focuses on histories and cultural politics of sexuality and reproduction in contemporary Australia, with particular attention to their shaping by discourses of race and national identity. She is particularly interested in the politics of abortion and is currently embarking on a cultural history of the provision of abortion services in Australia since 1990. She is also part of a collaborative project to historicise sexual citizenship in Australia. Her work is widely published in journals of history and gender and sexuality studies.

Keynote: Rosemary Coombe and Carys Craig

“COPYRIGHT AND THE MORAL ARTS OF APPROPRIATION: FEMINIST AND POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES”

This conference is animated by the question of how feminisms are shaped by the politics of appropriation. It brings together feminist scholars from across Canada to collectively deliberate over how contemporary appropriation works and what alternative forms of exchange can be imagined. Following Marx, appropriation is often theorized as a violent act of taking, producing alienation and property from acts of creation. Yet, within contemporary arts and new media, acts of digital appropriation are also performed as radical interventions that seek to subvert property regimes and authorial relations. Within anti-colonial and indigenous struggles, cultural appropriation is a form of epistemic violence that has accompanied material acts of theft and injury. Moreover, to appropriate can also mean to make proper and suitable, and thus to ethicize.

Given these multiple meanings of appropriation, this conference invites participants to track how feminisms and other political projects have also been appropriated, dis-assembled, remade within transnational circuits and new (as well as old) imperialisms.

How to theorize the work of appropriation today?

How does appropriation condition politics, as well as feminism?

What might feminist alternatives to appropriation look like?

I am looking forward to a guest post on Sunday about this Conference – stay tuned.